Scoop: The Shins and M. Ward Snub Portland

Gossip dropped in the ocean at the end.

CARRIE ON: The
sun came up, so it was another big week for Carrie Brownstein.
Undeterred by her Mayoral Madness loss to Victoria Taft, Brownstein
announced April 2 that she’ll publish a memoir with Riverhead Books, a
division of Penguin. It’s a different book than her last proposed
memoir, The Sound of Where You Are, which had been announced in
2010 with HarperCollins. “This one feels more organic, less academic,”
Brownstein says. She’s done a lot of stuff since then, like making
appearances on NPR game show Wait Wait…Don’t Tell Me! and Marc Maron’spodcast WTF to round out her March.

SNUBBED! Two
of Portland’s most iconic acts, the Shins and M. Ward, have failed to
add Portland dates to their tours for new albums. While both acts flirt
with other home bases—the Shins’ James Mercer hangs out in L.A., Ward
kicks it in Austin and Europe—we had expected some kind of homecoming
celebrations. Instead, local fans will have to wait for the Sasquatch!
festival in late May. And now a short list of inferior cities on the
artists’ respective tours: Nelsonville, Ohio; Missoula, Mont.; Reno,
Nev.; Upper Darby, Pa.

PLAYED LIST:A
reader complained that KZME 107.1-FM, the Portland station that plays
only local music, has shifted gears since a recent fundraising drive.
Actually, KZME is just expanding its genre-independent playlist, says
volunteer Chris Guy. “We’ve been adding more new music,” he says. “So
they’re not just hearing the same thing over and over.”

HOLE LOTTA BAKIN’ GOING ON: The
bagel wars continue, as Michael Madigan, the owner of Pearl District
commissary kitchen KitchenCru, is joining the fight. Madigan told WW
in an interview last year that there’s “no way” he would open a
restaurant: “I’ve just seen it grind up too many good people.” Now he
plans to open an Old Town bagel shop called Bowery Bagels, inspired by
the New York bagels of his youth. Madigan gave away 500 bagels (flavors
included soy-miso and truffle salt) at KitchenCru on March 31 to promote
the shop and road-test his recipes. Scoop enjoyed an excellent
everything bagel—the real test will be whether it can scale up to a
commercial level.

GHOST OF A SEASON: The Rose Garden is getting spoo-ooky. Grimm
stars David Giuntoli (plain-looking detective dude) and Silas Weir
Mitchell (awesome werewolf dude) showed up April 1 to watch the Blazers
beat the Timberwolves in a game of minimal NBA-wide consequence. Weird,
right? Then, at halftime, all sorts of weird monsters stormed the court
and begin to brawl! (It was mascot night.) Then, in the fourth quarter, a
crazy and/or heavily intoxicated man (with superhuman strength!)
barreled into the arena and had to be dragged out by a gang of ushers
and security guards. Reports of what happened next are fuzzy, but our
source says that once outside the arena, the man cackled, turned into a
bat and flew away. Grimm is totally real.